WiMax or the IEEE 802.16 standard is one of the most promising broadband wireless technologies nowadays. It is characterized by its high data rates, large coverage area, flexible design and QoS support. The standard defines two modes of operation: Point-to- Multi-Point (PMP) and the Mesh Mode. In the first mode, all nodes are connected directly to the base station and communication is not allowed amongst nodes. In the mesh mode, nodes are placed in an ad hoc manner communicating to neighbors and relaying the traffic of other nodes. The goal of this thesis is to design a partitioning scheme for the frame structure of the Mesh mode. Increasing the frame utilization would result in better support for QoS applications and optimized resource allocation, and thus revenue increase from the service provider’s perspective. The mesh frame is divided into control and data, which are further divided into centralized and distributed portions. We propose a novel and efficient scheme for partitioning the data subframe between the two schedulers. We use a Markovian model that studies the system behavior in the long run, and provides predictions based on analysis of previous window of frames. We further enhance the decision by tuning the partitioning through statistical analysis of smaller windows to accommodate demand changes. Our simulations show that the proposed scheme achieves high utilization under different network and traffic conditions and decreases the packet overflow. / Thesis (Master, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2008-10-02 18:41:36.551

Dans le contexte actuel de l’Internet, un enjeu de recherche majeur est de permettre aux applications et à leurs utilisateurs de disposer de systèmes de communication offrant une qualité de service (QdS) optimale. Ceci en fonction des ressources machine et réseau disponibles, dont les capacités et les performances, hétérogènes et variables, ne sont pas connues à l’avance. Le provisionnement optimal de la QdS dans ces futurs systèmes de communication autonomes nécessite d’une part la caractérisation des services et des ressources de communication disponibles, et d’autre part la prise en compte des expressions des besoins et des préférences des différents acteurs du système (utilisateurs, fournisseurs des services, etc.). Le sujet de la thèse porte sur la définition d’un cadre sémantique de QdS basé sur les ontologies pour la caractérisation des ressources et des services de communication dans le but de fournir la meilleure QdS au regard des besoins et des préférences des utilisateurs. Ce cadre sera utilisé dans la définition des objectifs et des contraintes de QdS et dans l’élaboration de modèles de décision. L'ensemble sera utilisé pour la mise en œuvre de QdS dans les systèmes de communication autonomes situés dans un contexte de réseaux domestiques / In the current context of the Internet, a major research challenge is to enable applications and users to have their communications systems with an optimal quality of service (QoS). Indeed, QoS provisioning should take into account the available machine and network resources, which capacities and performances are heterogeneous, variable, and not known in advance. The optimal QoS provisioning for the future autonomous communication systems requires the characterization of available services and communication resources and also taking into account the expressions of needs and preferences of different actors in the system (users, service providers, etc.). The subject of this thesis deals with the definition of a QoS ontology-based semantic framework for the characterization of network resources and communication services in order to provide better QoS according to the needs and preferences of users. This framewor! k will be used in the definition of objectives and QoS constraints as well as in the development of decision models in order to provide QoS for autonomous communication systems located in the context of home networks

Network management plays a vital role to keep a network and its application work e ciently. The network management in MANETs is a crucial and the challenging task, as these networks are characterized by dynamic environment and the scarcity of resources. There are various existing approaches for network management in MANETs. The Ad hoc Network Management Protocol (ANMP) has been one of the rst e orts and introduced an SNMP-based solution for MANETs. An alternative SNMP-based solu-tion is proposed by GUERRILLA Management Architecture (GMA). Due to self-organizing characteristic feature of MANETs, the management task has to be distributed. Policy-based network management relatively o ers this feature, by executing and applying policies pre-viously de ned by network manager. Otherwise, the complexity of realization and control becomes di cult Most of the works address the current status of the MANET to take the network man-agement decisions. Currently, MANETs addresses the dynamic and intelligent decisions by considering the present situation and all related history information of nodes into consid-eration. In this connection we have proposed a network management system using agents (NMSA) for MANETs, resolving major issues like, node monitoring, location management, resource management and QoS management. Solutions to these issues are discussed as inde-pendent protocols, and are nally combined into a single network management system, i.e., NMSA. Agents are autonomous, problem-solving computational entities capable of performing e ective operation in dynamic environments. Agents have cooperation, intelligence, and mobility characteristics as advantages. The agent platforms provide the di erent services to agents, like execution, mobility, communication, security, tracking, persistence and directory etc. The platform execution environment allows the agents to run, and mobility service allows them to travel among the di erent execution environments. The entire management task will be delegated to agents, which then executes the management logic in a distributed and autonomous fashion. In our work we used the static and mobile agents to nd some solutions to the management issues in a MANET. We have proposed a node monitoring protocol for MANETs, which uses both static agent (SA) and mobile agents (MA), to monitor the nodes status in the network. It monitors the gradational energy loss, bu er, bandwidth, and the mobility of nodes running with low to high load of mobile applications. Protocol assumes the MANET is divided into zones and sectors. The functioning of the protocol is divided into two segments, The NMP main segment, which runs at the chosen resource rich node (RRN) at the center of a MANET, makes use of SA which resides at same RRN, and the NMP subsegment which runs in the migrated MAs at the other nodes. Initially SA creates MAs and dispatches one MA to each zone, in order to monitor health conditions and mobility of nodes of the network. MAs carrying NMP subsegment migrates into the sector of a respective zone, and monitors the resources such as bandwidth, bu er, energy level and mobility of nodes. After collecting the nodes information and before moving to next sector they transfer collected information to SA respectively. SA in turn coordinates with other modules to analyze the nodes status information. We have validated the protocol by performing the conformance testing of the proposed node monitoring protocol (NMP) for MANETs. We used SDL to obtain MSCs, that repre-sents the scenario descriptions by sequence diagrams, which in turn generate test cases and test sequences. Then TTCN-3 is used to execute the test cases with respect to generated test sequences to know the conformance of protocol against the given speci cation. We have proposed a location management protocol for locating the nodes of a MANET, to maintain uninterrupted high-quality service for distributed applications by intelligently anticipating the change of location of its nodes by chosen neighborhood nodes. The LMP main segment of the protocol, which runs at the chosen RRN located at the center of a MANET, uses SA to coordinate with other modules and MA to predict the nodes with abrupt movement, and does the replacement with the chosen nodes nearby which have less mobility. We have proposed a resource management protocol for MANETs, The protocol makes use of SA and MA for fair allocation of resources among the nodes of a MANET. The RMP main segment of the protocol, which runs at the chosen RRN located at the center of a MANET, uses SA to coordinate with other modules and MA to allocate the resources among the nodes running di erent applications based on priority. The protocol does the distribution and parallelism of message propagation (mobile agent with information) in an e cient way in order to minimize the number of message passing with reduction in usage of network resources and improving the scalability of the network. We have proposed a QoS management protocol for MANETs, The QMP main segment of the protocol, which runs at the chosen RRN located at the center of a MANET, uses SA to coordinate with other modules and MA to allocate the resources among the nodes running di erent applications based on priority over QoS. Later, to reallocate the resources among the priority applications based on negotiation and renegotiation for varying QoS requirements. The performance testing of the protocol is carried out using TTCN-3. The generated test cases for the de ned QoS requirements are executed with TTCN-3, for testing of the associated QoS parameters, which leads to performance testing of proposed QoS management protocol for MANETs. We have combined the developed independent protocols for node monitoring, location management, resource management, and QoS management, into one single network management system called Network Management System using Agents (NMSA) for MANETs and tested in di erent environments. We have implemented NMSA on Java Agent development environment (JADE) Platform. Our developed network management system is a distributed system. It is basically divided into two parts, the Network Management Main Segment and other is Network Management Subsegment. A resource rich node (RRN) which is chosen at the center of a MANET where the Main segment of NMSA is located, and it controls the management activities. The other mobile nodes in the network will run MA which has the subsegments of NMSA. The network management system, i.e., the developed NMSA, has Network manage-ment main (NMSA main), Zones and sector segregation scheme, NMP, LMP, RMP, QMP main segments at the RRN along with SA deployed. The migrated MA at mobile node has subsegments of NMP, LMP, RMP, and QMP respectively. NMSA uses two databases, namely, Zones and sectors database and Node history database. Implementation of the proposed work is carried out in a con ned environment with, JDK and JADE installed on network nodes. The launched platform will have AMS and DF automatically generated along with MTP for exchange of message over the channel. Since only one JVM, which is installed, will executes on many hosts in order to provide the containers for agents on those hosts. It is the environment which o ered, for execution of agents. Many agents can be executed in parallel. The main container, is the one which has AMS and DF, and RMI registry are part of JADE environment which o ers complete run time environment for execution of agents. The distribution of the platform on many containers of nodes is shown in Fig. 1. The NMSA is based on Linux platform which provides distributed environment, and the container of JADE could run on various platforms. JAVA is the language used for code development. A middle layer, i.e., JDBC (java database connection) with SQL provides connectivity to the database and the application. The results of experiments suggest that the proposed protocols are e ective and will bring, dynamism and adaptiveness to the applied system and also reduction in terms network overhead (less bandwidth consumption) and response time.